


flutter

by sapphire2309



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Post Series, Second person POV, Stream of Consciousness, concrit welcome, explorations of cardiac conditions, i gender Samaritan as male, mentions of Root; Samaritan & Fusco, mentions of canon character deaths, spoilers through season five
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-25
Updated: 2017-07-25
Packaged: 2018-12-06 23:14:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11610963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphire2309/pseuds/sapphire2309
Summary: The war may be over but the wounds it left are still fresh.Or: You are Sameen Shaw, and you're blazingly angry.





	flutter

**Author's Note:**

> My gen bingo card is to blame for the second person PoV

You are Sameen Shaw. 

(Well, no, you're not. You probably can't dig a hollow point bullet out of your side (without flinching) or field strip a semi automatic or lift more than your body weight. But if you could try to think of a time, however brief, when you felt cold, dead to everything around you, any input from the world somehow translating into some kind of anger, that'll do just fine.)

You are Sameen Shaw, and somehow you're the only one who survived the apocalypse. 

Maybe apocalypse is too strong a word. I'd suggest the Great Filter, but that might bring back memories of Samaritan and his vicelike grip on the heart of your city. Massacre?

You're the only one who survived the massacre. Well, you and Fusco, but even though he's been working with Finch and Reese longer than you, he's always been somewhat... ancillary. Incidental. A conveniently placed asset, but somehow not exactly mission-critical. 

(That'll probably change now that there's just two of you.)

You don't quite know what to feel about Root's death. Most days, like everything else, you find a reason to be angry. _She's not flirting aggressively, she's not dragging you off on her God's missions, she's not... she's not. She isn't. She does not exist._

Today is most days.

You are Sameen Shaw, and you're blazingly angry. 

(To be fair, you have plenty of reason. These past few days have been unreasonably bloody. Too many people have died, and revenge was either exacted too quickly or not at all.) (Samaritan has many human agents that'll do just fine, but you wish you could at least smash up some of his servers, rip out a few cables and burn them.) (You could pretend, but you've never been any good at fooling yourself. It wouldn't do much for the anger.)

You're angry, but underneath that, there are unfamiliar emotions you don't know how to parse. Sure, you've gotten better at smiling all the way up to your eyes (Root's fault) but the odd flutter when you pass any electronics store with a black laptop or two in the window makes less sense. What do you do with that? How is it productive? Useful?

You have no time for things that aren't useful. 

(Smiles might be an exception, now. Wouldn't have been before. But things change. Have changed.) (Root taught you about smiles. Not with words, but by example. The flirty 'come-hither' smile she used to draw you in. The wicked grin right before she inflicted violence on someone. The real smile, or what you think was the real smile - it only showed up in quiet moments: a quick glance in the middle of coding something or hacking someone, or sometimes, right after sex.) (That one, you aren't sure of. Was it real or not real? Samaritan or Root? You'll never find out now.)

The flutters of... feeling... don't do anything useful, don't provide any necessary data. You exercise harder for a week - longer runs, more sets of squats and push-ups and crunches - to make sure nothing's wrong with your heart. Your body takes on the extra work with something akin to joy, but the flutter doesn't stop showing up every now and then. 

You're not the kind of person who resigns herself to the vagaries of the human mind without at least trying to comprehend them. You stay up late some nights, combing through medical journals and the latest cardiology research. You find various conditions that list something resembling the flutter as a symptom - mostly cardiac disorders (which strikes you as _possibly humorous_ , your instincts for humour have never been like most people's, you should probably look into that) - but nothing you fit the differential diagnosis for. 

At some point, you find an alternative name for stress cardiomyopathy, a syndrome that can cause chest pains and lead someone to believe they're having a heart attack. 

Some romantic sap anointed it Broken Heart Syndrome. 

You don't fit the differential, but you keep coming back to it, reading case study after case study. By the end of it, you know more about stress cardiomyopathy (you refuse to give it any other name) than most doctors. 

It doesn't help at all, knowing this. 

But it's something concrete, something you can understand. Something that isn't an out of reach feeling, just an accident of hormones and biology. Stress expressing itself. 

It doesn't make the flutter _useful_ , but at least it starts to make sense.


End file.
